The First American Army (41 page)
Read The First American Army Online
Authors: Bruce Chadwick
By the spring of 1778, an affair had been going on for some time between Colonel Seely and the attractive Mrs. Ball, the wife of his friend Doctor Ball. It is unknown how it started or how quickly it caught fire, but the two had deep feelings for each other. The relationship between two friends, in a small town where everyone seemed to know everyone else’s business, was dangerous, but the pair seemed to have carried it off without the local gossips finding out. Seely and Mrs. Ball usually rendezvoused in an apple orchard on the outskirts of Chatham; they arranged the meetings during the day in brief conversations with each other. The large apple orchards of the surrounding area, thick with trees in spring and summer, offered the privacy they needed.
Seely was smitten with her and referred to her as his “charmer” and “my jewel” in the cipher code in his diary. She was equally taken by him. They had known each other as friends for over six years since Seely had moved to Chatham. They saw each other in church, at stores in the village, and at dinner parties at the homes of mutual friends. Seely often walked past her residence in the village; the two passed each other constantly when on horseback. Mrs. Ball was friendly with Jane Seely and the women visited each other at their homes.
Little has been written about sex in the colonial era. There have been some works on the large percentages of women who became pregnant and then married, but the married men and women of the era were careful not to write down anything about the sexual liaisons outside of the marriage bed. There were surely a number of extramarital trysts then, just as there are today, and unhappy people sought new partners outside the home. There were few divorces because people had large families and tended to stay together for the sake of their children. Churches also frowned on divorce. There were some and they were messy. Husbands sometimes took out ads in newspapers to announce the split and to remind all that they would not pay any of their spouses’ bills. Most unhappy men remained married and some, such as Seely, chased other women.
Seely fancied himself a smooth womanizer, but he was putty in Mrs. Ball’s lovely hands. She sent him notes arranging meetings in the orchard and would not show up, leaving him standing alone, seething. She would agree to meet and then break the engagement at the last moment. She would hold what he termed “sweet” conversations with him at her home but then act coldly later in the evening when they met. Then, without warning, she would thaw out and shower him with affections in the apple orchard. The extent of the liaison was never spelled out in Seely’s diary, but on at least one occasion he said that she came “to his bed,” so it was sexual as well as romantic.
What Jane Seely knew about the affair was never known and throughout the Revolution, as the extramarital relationship continued, she never accused her husband of a liaison. But she knew something was going on. Mrs. Ball and Seely had several meetings in the orchard in July 1778. On August 3, Mrs. Ball visited Jane Seely, unannounced, for another casual visit between friends, but Mrs. Seely was cold and aloof toward her. A nervous Seely, at home when she arrived, scribbled in his diary that his wife “acted imprudently” toward his girlfriend. Mrs. Ball then fretted Jane Seely knew something and cancelled their next meeting in the orchard.
Seely continued his relationship with the doctor’s wife, but it was always an uncertain love. She would meet with him but argue about something. At their next meeting they would “share sweet kisses,” as he put it. Then she would not show up while he waited on cold nights in the orchard. His nighttime disappearances did not go unnoticed by his wife and throughout the entire fall of 1778, Seely wrote in his secret journal, Jane Seely was cold toward her husband.
In February 1779, following yet another snowstorm, Seely and his lover ended one of their evenings with a horrific argument over something and Seely was shaken. “Had great difference with the delight of my soul, so great that I believe it will never be made up. Oh, my heart. How shall I bear it?” he wrote in his diary.
Then, just four days later, the pair made up.
In the middle of this extramarital jousting, which Seely admitted made him “miserable,” his wife Jane appeared to have lived through a bout with breast cancer. She had been to a doctor who prescribed a mixture of roots and herbs, popular at the time, to treat some abnormality in her breasts. A distraught Seely went with his brother Sam to his friend Thomas Gardner’s home to obtain some roots to pound into a mixture to treat her breast ailment.
Jane recovered. She resumed her work as a midwife and continued to accompany her husband to dinner parties, church, and receptions. They visited friends and relatives and kept up a public facade of a happy marriage. There was always a chill in the union, though, as the militia leader kept meeting Mrs. Ball. The affair would not continue much longer, however, because Mrs. Ball became more interested in another man.
March and April featured warm days and other days when the temperature fell well below freezing and snowfalls of up to several inches were recorded. On April 18, 1779, Seely wrote in his diary that “it froze so hard as to kill the leave and the ice is half an inch thick.” The wild weather also brought diphtheria, whooping cough, typhoid and scarlet fever, and tuberculosis to Chatham and other towns in northern New Jersey.
The rough weather foreshadowed one of the worst winters of American history later that year, a winter that would threaten to destroy the army and end the Revolution.
The African American Soldiers
The War
T
he victory at Monmouth was the only major engagement in the summer of 1778. Following the battle, the British continued on to New York, fearful that the city might be attacked by the French fleet that had sailed for America. The French admiral claimed that he could not maneuver properly in New York harbor and did not assault the city. Washington set up his summer camp in White Plains, north of New York, to monitor British movements in the area.
Revolutionary activity took place in the west that spring when George Rogers Clark gained authorization from Virginia governor Patrick Henry to lead an expedition west to attack British forces and their Indian allies in the territories of Ohio and Illinois. He captured Kaskaskia, in Illinois, without resistance and then convinced the French settlers at Vincennes to side with the Americans. The British governor of the territory gathered a force of regulars and Indians from headquarters in Detroit and took back Vincennes in December 1778. The governor sent his Indians home a few weeks later and in February 1779, Clark returned and captured the fort for a second time following a short siege.
One of the Continental Army’s continuing problems in the winter and spring of 1778 was the loss of men. Measures taken by George Washington to curb desertions following the large exodus of troops the year before had cut down the number of deserters, but they were still a problem. Officers continued to have difficulty convincing others to reenlist when their time was up. Recruiting new troops always proved difficult and doing so became even harder following the terrible winter at Valley Forge and the recent smallpox epidemic.
One of the answers to the problem was the recruitment of African Americans, both freedmen and slaves. Freedmen would earn salaries and receive cash or land bounties, like white recruits, but slaves would be given something more valuable—their freedom. Any slave who served a full term, ranging from one to three years, would be freed when he left the army; they would also be paid. There were a half million slaves in the southern colonies in 1776, but there were also sixty thousand in the north. They worked for farmers, city merchants, shipping companies and as domestics. Some states, such as New York, had as many as twenty-one thousand slaves.
Black American soldiers were not new; a few had fought for the colonial militias that served with the British army during the French and Indian War from 1756–1763. Prior to the war, and during its early days, several blacks had fought for local state militias. Washington was hopeful that freedom would be a powerful incentive to persuade African Americans to enlist and to remain in the army, thus swelling the ranks for the 1778 summer campaign. And, too, African Americans who joined the service and some white public figures believed victory in the Revolution, fought to end America’s slavery to England, would end slavery itself in America.
African American soldiers were needed because in 1778 states found it hard to recruit white residents for troop strengths mandated by Congress. One state, Rhode Island, had such trouble signing up soldiers that it even created an all-black regiment and assigned some of its better soldiers to come home to train its members. It was the most prominent of three black regiments fighting for America. One small group, the American Bucks, was raised in Massachusetts and a third, the Black Brigade of Saint Domingue, from Haiti, fought with the French army in Georgia in 1779.
S
ometime during the morning of March 26, 1778, newly promoted Sergeant Jeremiah Greenman, sent home to Providence from Valley Forge to recruit troops, picked up a copy of the
Providence Gazette
and read a notice published in its pages by his commanding officer, Colonel Christopher Greene. Colonel Greene ordered all of the new recruits for Rhode Island’s two regiments to report to East Greenwich, twenty miles south on the western side of Narragansett Bay, for the spring campaign. The weather had been unusually mild during the past two weeks, but a few hours after Greenman put down the newspaper the sky darkened and, the sergeant wrote, “it began to snow very fast indeed.”
The next day, Jeremiah Greenman found himself marching through several inches of snow in hilly Providence toward East Greenwich to undertake one of the most unusual, and historic, assignments of the war. He had been selected by his commanding officer as one of the drillmasters to train America’s first permanent regiment of all-black troops, the First Rhode Island.
Greenman thought little about the assignment. He trained the black recruits on how to parade, maneuver on the battlefield, load, fire, and care for muskets. The more than two hundred men in his regiment were given their guns on April 15. Arming former slaves meant little to Greenman, who remarked casually in his journal that “we got our guns draw’d,” and nothing more.
George Washington, who held mixed feelings about freeing slaves all of his life, did not initially want “a black corps,” as he later wrote General William Heath and others.
1
Now, though, needing as many trained men as he could obtain, he had changed his mind, albeit reluctantly, and was happy to have men from among Rhode Island’s 2,671 slaves.
2
Washington recognized them as a huge pool from which to enlist much needed troops. He wanted this new all-black unit in Rhode Island to succeed, too, and so he put it under the command of Greene, a relative of his trusted aide, Nathanael Greene.
Washington had seen the reliability of black soldiers during the French and Indian War, when he served as a colonial officer under British General William Braddock, the head of a British army in Virginia in 1755.
3
One New Hampshire black, Robert Miller, fought for the colonial militia that was part of the British army in that war; twenty years later his son fought in the Continental Army against the British.
4
The coming of the Revolution gave antislavery forces their greatest ammunition. Rev. Samuel Allinson, of New Jersey, used that argument in a letter to Patrick Henry, reminding him that it would be “the lasting disgrace” of Congress not to grant freedom to blacks “if they should spend so much time to secure their own liberties and leave no vestige of their regard to those of their fellow men in bondage to themselves.” Congressional delegate James Otis wrote that “those who barter away other men’s liberty will soon care little for their own.”
5
One of the voices against slavery belonged to George Washington, who had spoken out against it several times during the previous decade. He introduced a bill to halt the transportation of slaves to Virginia in the 1760s. In 1774, he introduced, with his friend George Fairfax, “resolves,” or formal proposals, on the issue. In them, again, Washington called for curbs on slavery, describing bondage as a “wicked, cruel, and unnatural trade.” Later, connecting the Revolution to slavery, he wrote that Americans had to free themselves from England or be turned into as “tame and abject slaves as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway,” adding that the blacks were “poor wretches.”
6
It was no surprise then, when he badly needed troops, that George Washington turned to the slave population of the states and offered freedom as an inducement.